The New Dark Ages, Part II

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
Richard Dawkins, on the September 11 attacks, in Positive Atheism

In The New Dark Ages I bemoaned the decline of science literacy in the United States, and laid the blame, at least partially, at the feet of religion. I think it is a valid indictment. But I think we also have to consider the possibility that religion is adaptive. By we I mean secular-humanists and atheists who believe in a mechanical universe; by adaptive I mean conferring a reproductive advantage to believers.

The two things that every human culture invents, without fail, are religion and intoxicants. I think both inventions spring from the same human malady: the pain of existential loneliness. We connect with other people, when we connect, fleetingly and imperfectly. We spend most of our lives locked inside our skulls, peering out at a dangerous world. Religion and intoxicants, at best, give us the chance to transcend our tiny selves. About the death of his son, Emerson wrote:

The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience

I’ve said, in conversations with and , that belief in god, in some agency larger than ourselves, may be a useful psychological device. In particular, I think it can breed a kind of humility that’s very liberating: I’m just a person, and I don’t have all the answers. Of course, many people come to that kind of humility without resort to supernatural beliefs. For some the vastness of the universe, or the depth and intricacy of the natural world, serve as a check on human grandiosity. (It’s interesting, in fact, that fundamentalists object to the teaching of evolution simultaneously on the grounds that it exalts humans over god, and that it debases humans by making them just another animal.) Personally, every time I look at NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, or think about the wildly improbable chain of events that led from the common ancestor of humans and apes to me, I’m pretty humbled, but the vast majority of people do not respond to science the same way.
Religion also strengthens group cohesion: people who otherwise have little in common (I’m thinking the millionaire George W. Bush and his trailer-park-and-mayonnaise-sandwich followers) bond through shared religious beliefs. Islam binds together Asians, Africans, Arabs, and not a few Europeans and Americans; Judaism unites Russians, Africans, and Semitic peoples; and there are three times as many practicing Hindus as American citizens.
You could make the argument that feelings of transcendence, humility and group solidarity make us more functional human beings: we’re less likely to kill ourselves in a fit of existential despair; we’re more likely to bring children into the world, and nurture them until they’re old enough to fend for themselves; and our survival is enhanced by belonging to a group. Again, this isn’t an argument for the moral force of religion, nor its (slim) intellectual underpinnings—it’s merely an acknowledgment of the reproductive success of religious people.
Here’s the thing: what may be a good reproductive strategy for individuals might just be lethal for humans as a species. To cite the most obvious threat (though not the most likely), the mullahs in Tehran are working on acquiring nuclear weapons. Given their history of tolerance for dissenting religious views, it’s not unreasonable to worry that they might deliver their next fatwa atop an ICBM. More likely, if less immediate, is the possibility that religious prohibitions against family planning will push the population of the Earth beyond its carrying capacity. Overpopulation could cause a crash that would reduce the human race to pre-industrial technological levels, or worse. Besides these civilization-ending scenarios are the run-of-the-mill religious wars, terrorism, and entirely preventable disease, famine and drought.
In A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, biologist Richard Dawkins describes religion as a “mind virus” or hostile meme. I think he’s right, but has cast the net too broadly: just as all microorganisms aren’t dangerous—indeed many are beneficial or even critical to human life—not all religions lead us toward self-destruction. If I had to identify the mental bacillus most likely to trigger a fatal epidemic, I’d pick fundamentalism.
Unlike its more benign relatives, fundamentalism cannot coexist with science, civil liberties, nor democracy. Fundamentalism is a backward-looking metastases that chokes the life out of whatever civilization it invades. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, or Jewish fundamentalism (there are, to be sure, fundamentalists of every faith, but the “religions of the book” seem the most prone to the disease): all promote intolerance, anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and a viciously dualistic notion of the value of human life. To fundamentalists, only true believers are truly human.
It’s unfortunate that we can’t isolate fundamentalists in their own little world, a la Robert A. Heinlein’s Coventry. That might give fundamentalists the world they deserve, if not the world they imagine: famine, disease, crushing poverty and unending violence and strife—in the words of Hobbes:

…there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain;
and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use
of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious
Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things
as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;
no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is
worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death;
And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

As it is, unless we find a way to disarm the fundamentalists, literally and figuratively, they may drag us down with them into the Hobbesian nightmare they imagine to be a dream of paradise, and from which we might never awake.